You are not being very patriotic shackdweller. If you don't like it in Australia, giiiiiit out.

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You sure do sprout a lot of 'facts' puppet.

They don't exactly sell them on the street corner puppet. Even Iran has trouble, and Saddam didn't get very far. 9/11 was a pretty convoluted scheme. There are plenty of conventional weapons that could have done the same or worse, if Al Quaida had been able to get their hands on them.

Back on the topic... I thought most people would know about ASIS but I guess not. In which case you should also find out about another secret spy agency called the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). I gather they're even more secretive than bother ASIO and ASIS and do a bit more than just the cyber security stuff their website talks about.

Gist wrote on Jul 21^st, 2012 at 4:03pm:


Why do these spy agencies have websites and give press conferences and stuff? misinformation? Seems a bit contrary to their whole existence.

SOB

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Strawman.

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You seriously think WMDs are more dangerous in the hands of big governments than terrorist organisations?

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I am not naive enough to assume it won't happen if we just hope the threat goes away.

Sir Spot of Borg wrote on Jul 21^st, 2012 at 4:17pm:


Whatever information they make public wouldn't be critical to whatever security agenda they have. Real security is undermined and compromised by knowing specifics and technical details about important assets. For example, knowing the name of the organisation, how many personnel they have and their goals isn't going to help you defeat or infiltrate them or allow you to capture and control whatever assets they are protecting. A lot of the information they would make public is general stuff and pretty obvious.

What really undermines security is knowing encryption codes, what algorithms and protocols they use in their computer systems, what materials they use to make a particular weapon, the engineering required, manufacturing techniques, technical specifications, design limits, schematics, etc. That's the "hardware and software" aspect of intelligence.

Then there's the political aspect -- keeping the other kinds of state secrets hidden -- things the government is doing that the public and other foreign governments shouldn't know about like secret deals made between national governments or other things that need to be covered up for our own good.

These spy agencies have web sites and press conferences because in a democracy, we need to know if we can trust them. It's to show that these spy agencies are run by ordinary people and not by some secret society underground. The other reason is like I said before, they have to debate this stuff in Parliament and not have to keep talking about some "nameless organisation" and its "unspeakable details" which would be pretty awkward. It goes without saying that whatever they do debate in Parliament won't directly compromise national security.